Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a non-profit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it....
the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site
My understanding was that the people on the flight that went down in Pennsylvania were using cell-phones to get updated about what was going on in the real world.
Is there any actual evidence that phones do interfere with flight electronics? As far as I know, it's just an overdone precaution. After all, if it were a problem, why aren't phones also banned from airports? Why aren't phone masts, orders of magnitude more powerful than handsets, sited well away from airports? Is there any overlap between the frequencies used by phones any one of rader, air-to-ground comms, a plane's internal electronic buses?
I was on a plane once where they didn't even let you use a Walkman in case it interfered with their electronics!
Some things happen as a result of market forces, some as a result of government forces
A democratic government (or any government in which the taxpayers have any influence in decision making) is a crude market. The currency is the vote instead of the dollar.
The real use of government from an industrial perspective is that it can take extreme risk; the fact that it controls land and an army means that it isn't going anywhere, so it can afford to risk losing a great deal of money without going bankrupt.
Office program expose the API. To get the text out of a MS Word program, even if you have Windows and Office, you have to start up Word, which is really inefficient.
True, but you only need to do it once. You can use the API to extract the contents and then store them yourself in any format you want, then run the indexer over that.
Nazism killed a lot of people, the wish to eradicate groups of the population being an integral part of the nazi ideas.
Well, I contrasted fascism and communism, not nazism ("Hitlerism", if you will) and Stalinism.
The modern-day Left would have you believe that Hitler and Stalin were ideological enemies, but it would be far more accurate to describe them as rivals. They both ran totalitarian police states with absolute power concentrated in a single leader, both believed that the only purpose of the citizen should be to serve the state (and hence the maximum leader), both ran command economies, both had expansionist foreign policies, both persecuted ethnic minorities. The only real way to differentiate between them is that Stalin's purges killed 3-4x what Hitler's did. It is also worth noting that other self-described Communists (China, Cambodia, etc) have similar records to Stalin's.
But mysteriously, modern-day Fascists are shunned and modern-day Communists are tolerated. In fact, the same attitude should apply to them both; neither has a place in the modern world.
Let's look at a little history. If during the 18th century, we had spent an equivalent amount of dough on sailing ships (with the (un)stated goal of preventing deaths (monarchs HATE to look bad)) I think we'd still be looking for our assholes with a mirror. We'd never have left Europe. The economy of the day would not have tolerated it.
You're exactly right. I think something along those lines everytime I'm sitting on a plane and the purser explains that safety is the airline's number 1 priority. If it was, we'd never leave the ground!
After the Apollo missions, there was no budget to keep up the plans for the Apollo V spacecraft. If NASA wanted to land men on the moon again, they would have to reinvent the great rocket science of Wernher von Braun.
Can you clarify what you mean by that? Did the engineering drawings require some special sort of preservation (maybe they were done on acidic paper)? Why can't they just get the plans out of the library and manufacture the parts?
Of course there are better ways to do a lot of stuff these days (better materials, for one) but recreating Apollo as it was should be straightforward, if costly.
The conjecture is that every simply connected compact 3-manifold without boundary is homeomorphic to a 3-sphere. (Loosely speaking, that every 3-dimensional object that has a set of sphere-like properties can be stretched or squeezed until it is a 3-sphere without breaking it).
Did Katz really stop posting to slashdot? Permanently? Did he say why? I haven't seen him for awhile, but I'm not sure if this is because he's on sabbatical or what have you. Please do tell! I rather detest his drivel.
Well, you can filter him out in your user preferences, maybe that's what you did?
So it probably sounded like a good idea to filter out Nazis...everyone hates Nazis right? (except the Nazis) While we're at it let's censor White Supremicists, cause we all hate them too.
The list of what's censored is in an of itself controversial. For example, pro-Fascist sites are censored... what about pro-Communist sites? After all, Stalin killed 20M or more of his own people in his purges compared with 6M in the Holocaust. Anti-abortion sites are censored, what about pro-Catholic? After all, Catholics oppose abortion.
Note that I'm not claiming to be pro or anti anything in this post, I'm merely pointing our some gaping inconsistencies that render the policy meaningless, and hence probably mere cheap political point-scoring rather than a serious attempt to suppress hate-crime or make the world a better place. Assuming you believe in hate-crime; my personal opinion is that it matters little to the victim what the criminal's motivation was.
Even more meaningless than it would be if French and German users couldn't simply point their browsers at google.ca.
I really have my doubts about wether Microsoft will allow "any programmer with a Perl script and a bit of intelligence" to muck around with Office documents.
Why not? After all, the high-quality ActiveState port of Perl to Win32 exists because Microsoft paid for it, and you can download it for free. Not only that, but if you want to write your own code to manipulate Office documents, you have been able to do that for years in VBA - all the Office programs expose rich APIs. In fact, they are composed of Objects that you can instantiate and use in your own programs if you want - all MS care about is that there is a licensed copy of Office on the user's machine. One of the easiest ways to do charting is to simply reuse a bit of Excel, for example. From there it's a short hop via COM to any program you want.
I'm guessing their XML document format will be just as hard to decyper and the current office formats.
The fact that Office documents have been in a proprietary format in the past is actually unimportant, since the interfaces to the applications (and hence their documents) are well documented (check MSDN or Barnes & Noble if you don't believe me). So the reason that Microsoft are doing this is that they lose nothing and gain from making the platform even more attractive to developers.
The BBC is a Corporation under Royal Charter. It may seem like a subtle difference, but it means that the BBC for the most part is run like any other company with the exception that it's board is appointed by the Crown, and it's main form of revenue is the license fee.
Then can you explain the practical differences, if any, between the license fee and a hypothecated poll tax on televisions?
Calling it a corporation rather than a department is mere semantics. After all, license payers are not customers in any meaningful way, since you have to pay the fee irregardless of whether you watch the BBC 24 hrs a day, or not at all. Exactly the same as you pay NI whether or not you ever use a hospital.
But anyways, it's not like the police were going to win against the BBC's high-priced lawyers -- and now that this lawsuit's over, the police (read: taxpayers) also have to pay the BBC's mega legal fees, too, even if the rest of it is just 850 pounds.
You're right - one taxpayer-funded entity is suing another taxpayer-funded entity, over something that was developed with the taxpayer's money and therefore rightfully belongs in the public domain. They only people who are coming out of this ahead are the lawyers. What a coincidence that the present Prime Minister, his wife, and most of their friends, colleagues and supporters are all lawyers. Shakespeare had the right idea centuries ago.
BSD is closer to public domain than GPL, and Government-funded code SHOULD be public domain.
It should be BSD licence for the taxpayers who paid for it, and GPL for everyone else in the world. That's fair because everyone only pays once but does pay, whether in cash or in contributed code.
The reason that ISPs don't want to help the police in monitoring the activities of their users is that they know illegal activity is an attractive part of the Internet.
Well, maybe not illegal, but stuff you wouldn't necessarily want the public (and hence your family and friends) to know that you did, like looking at pr0n and gambling. Demand from paying pr0n customers is why we have cheap, ubiquitous bandwidth like ADSL available now. If those users go away, it'll make the dot.com implosion look like a picnic.
It is not politically possible for the government of the day to direct the content of the BBC
Other than appointing Party donors to all the top jobs, you mean? Which is exactly what they've done. I don't know if you caught any of the coverage of the recent Labour Party conference, but it was impossible to tell where the spin doctors stopped and the BBC began.
I don't really understand what a bank or hospital would need with a CAD or 3d rendering program? All they need is a front end to their database of clients/patients, which was mostly likely custom made for them in the first place.
There is masses and masses of software written specifically for Sun workstations running at banks, mostly combined analytic and deal capture systems. Sun made inroads into banking when traders needed rock-solid desktops well before you could do that with Windows (and you can these days, if you have competent sysadmins). In many cases, a bank will choose the software they want, and then choose from amongst the hardware/OS vendors that the software is available on, rather than choosing the equipment first - this is the same in engineering, geophysics, whatever. Applications are what matters - if you don't have them, your OS is going nowhere, no matter how good it is.
I think what this really needs is to be make easier for the mainstream, so anyone could do it. Perhaps bundle the tools (programming and deployment) with mainstream operating systems?
Sun have Grid Engine and I believe Intel have something similar. The issue is that this kind of distributed processing is only useful for problems that can be divided into many discrete subtasks, which do not need to interact with other nodes while they are running, otherwise the work you need to do to communicate between nodes slaughters performance (that's why clustering hasn't taken over the world, vertical scaling on an active backplane is still the best solution for most jobs). The typical corporate large-compute job is data mining or decision support, neither of which scale particularly well horizontally.
He did not want to go thru such an experience again, and thus told (threatened) me not to play with error message text.
It's a serious issue. If your customer has a system running bespoke code from many different vendors, and you have sloppy or frivolous errors in your logs, then there is a high likelihood that they will think the rest of your code is sloppy, and you will be the first person they call if anything goes wrong. Even if the problem is elsewhere, it still sucks up valuable time when you have to prove to them what really happened and why it's another vendor's fault. If you want to be taken seriously, then even the log files your application generates have to be polished.
Have you ever had that feeling when you've written your program, it compiles with no errors, but you are afraid to run it because if it doesn't work, you've no idea what else to try?
Re:How to totally screw up Win2k in less than 1 mi
on
Gnarly Error Messages
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, and disable all services.
An easier way to screw up any NT kernel based OS is to set its pagefile smaller than 2M. It'll still run, but it won't be a happy bunny...
You're not getting it. The implication is that the various 'isms' should be mixed together.
But North Korea has everything to gain from the South in terms of prosperity and freedom, and it is unclear what, if anything, the South would gain from the North. Really, the North Korean leadership have no bargaining chips apart from their army; their country is destitute and dependent on foreign aid to prevent mass starvation. Why do you think North Koreans frequently attempt to defect to the South but no-one wants to go the other way?
For successful blends of the three, think Canada, Australia, or Western Europe. Do you think that the average American is happier than the average citizen of these other places? Think again.
It's hard to say. In the short term it's very easy to buy the voter's favour with subsidies and welfare, even the ancient Romans knew this, but they called it "bread and circuses". The question is a long term one; how happy will the heavily taxed Western Europeans be when they reach their own retirements and find that the cupboard is bare?
Slashdot Mirror
See here.
Why not protien folding or cures for cancer? Some because there is no Linux client.
Click here.
I'd *love* to switch from SETI to the cancer research program, but I'm definitely not switching to Windows to do it!
There are Linux and MacOSX clients for Folding@Home, other Unices like Solaris, IRIX and AIX are coming as soon as they port them.
My understanding was that the people on the flight that went down in Pennsylvania were using cell-phones to get updated about what was going on in the real world.
Is there any actual evidence that phones do interfere with flight electronics? As far as I know, it's just an overdone precaution. After all, if it were a problem, why aren't phones also banned from airports? Why aren't phone masts, orders of magnitude more powerful than handsets, sited well away from airports? Is there any overlap between the frequencies used by phones any one of rader, air-to-ground comms, a plane's internal electronic buses?
I was on a plane once where they didn't even let you use a Walkman in case it interfered with their electronics!
Some things happen as a result of market forces, some as a result of government forces
A democratic government (or any government in which the taxpayers have any influence in decision making) is a crude market. The currency is the vote instead of the dollar.
The real use of government from an industrial perspective is that it can take extreme risk; the fact that it controls land and an army means that it isn't going anywhere, so it can afford to risk losing a great deal of money without going bankrupt.
Office program expose the API. To get the text out of a MS Word program, even if you have Windows and Office, you have to start up Word, which is really inefficient.
True, but you only need to do it once. You can use the API to extract the contents and then store them yourself in any format you want, then run the indexer over that.
Nazism killed a lot of people, the wish to eradicate groups of the population being an integral part of the nazi ideas.
Well, I contrasted fascism and communism, not nazism ("Hitlerism", if you will) and Stalinism.
The modern-day Left would have you believe that Hitler and Stalin were ideological enemies, but it would be far more accurate to describe them as rivals. They both ran totalitarian police states with absolute power concentrated in a single leader, both believed that the only purpose of the citizen should be to serve the state (and hence the maximum leader), both ran command economies, both had expansionist foreign policies, both persecuted ethnic minorities. The only real way to differentiate between them is that Stalin's purges killed 3-4x what Hitler's did. It is also worth noting that other self-described Communists (China, Cambodia, etc) have similar records to Stalin's.
But mysteriously, modern-day Fascists are shunned and modern-day Communists are tolerated. In fact, the same attitude should apply to them both; neither has a place in the modern world.
Let's look at a little history. If during the 18th century, we had spent an equivalent amount of dough on sailing ships (with the (un)stated goal of preventing deaths (monarchs HATE to look bad)) I think we'd still be looking for our assholes with a mirror. We'd never have left Europe. The economy of the day would not have tolerated it.
You're exactly right. I think something along those lines everytime I'm sitting on a plane and the purser explains that safety is the airline's number 1 priority. If it was, we'd never leave the ground!
After the Apollo missions, there was no budget to keep up the plans for the Apollo V spacecraft. If NASA wanted to land men on the moon again, they would have to reinvent the great rocket science of Wernher von Braun.
Can you clarify what you mean by that? Did the engineering drawings require some special sort of preservation (maybe they were done on acidic paper)? Why can't they just get the plans out of the library and manufacture the parts?
Of course there are better ways to do a lot of stuff these days (better materials, for one) but recreating Apollo as it was should be straightforward, if costly.
The conjecture is that every simply connected compact 3-manifold without boundary is homeomorphic to a 3-sphere. (Loosely speaking, that every 3-dimensional object that has a set of sphere-like properties can be stretched or squeezed until it is a 3-sphere without breaking it).
I'm sphere-like but I ain't no homeomorph, buddy!
Did Katz really stop posting to slashdot? Permanently? Did he say why? I haven't seen him for awhile, but I'm not sure if this is because he's on sabbatical or what have you. Please do tell! I rather detest his drivel.
Well, you can filter him out in your user preferences, maybe that's what you did?
So it probably sounded like a good idea to filter out Nazis...everyone hates Nazis right? (except the Nazis) While we're at it let's censor White Supremicists, cause we all hate them too.
The list of what's censored is in an of itself controversial. For example, pro-Fascist sites are censored... what about pro-Communist sites? After all, Stalin killed 20M or more of his own people in his purges compared with 6M in the Holocaust. Anti-abortion sites are censored, what about pro-Catholic? After all, Catholics oppose abortion.
Note that I'm not claiming to be pro or anti anything in this post, I'm merely pointing our some gaping inconsistencies that render the policy meaningless, and hence probably mere cheap political point-scoring rather than a serious attempt to suppress hate-crime or make the world a better place. Assuming you believe in hate-crime; my personal opinion is that it matters little to the victim what the criminal's motivation was.
Even more meaningless than it would be if French and German users couldn't simply point their browsers at google.ca.
I really have my doubts about wether Microsoft will allow "any programmer with a Perl script and a bit of intelligence" to muck around with Office documents.
Why not? After all, the high-quality ActiveState port of Perl to Win32 exists because Microsoft paid for it, and you can download it for free. Not only that, but if you want to write your own code to manipulate Office documents, you have been able to do that for years in VBA - all the Office programs expose rich APIs. In fact, they are composed of Objects that you can instantiate and use in your own programs if you want - all MS care about is that there is a licensed copy of Office on the user's machine. One of the easiest ways to do charting is to simply reuse a bit of Excel, for example. From there it's a short hop via COM to any program you want.
I'm guessing their XML document format will be just as hard to decyper and the current office formats.
The fact that Office documents have been in a proprietary format in the past is actually unimportant, since the interfaces to the applications (and hence their documents) are well documented (check MSDN or Barnes & Noble if you don't believe me). So the reason that Microsoft are doing this is that they lose nothing and gain from making the platform even more attractive to developers.
The BBC is a Corporation under Royal Charter. It may seem like a subtle difference, but it means that the BBC for the most part is run like any other company with the exception that it's board is appointed by the Crown, and it's main form of revenue is the license fee.
Then can you explain the practical differences, if any, between the license fee and a hypothecated poll tax on televisions?
Calling it a corporation rather than a department is mere semantics. After all, license payers are not customers in any meaningful way, since you have to pay the fee irregardless of whether you watch the BBC 24 hrs a day, or not at all. Exactly the same as you pay NI whether or not you ever use a hospital.
But anyways, it's not like the police were going to win against the BBC's high-priced lawyers -- and now that this lawsuit's over, the police (read: taxpayers) also have to pay the BBC's mega legal fees, too, even if the rest of it is just 850 pounds.
You're right - one taxpayer-funded entity is suing another taxpayer-funded entity, over something that was developed with the taxpayer's money and therefore rightfully belongs in the public domain. They only people who are coming out of this ahead are the lawyers. What a coincidence that the present Prime Minister, his wife, and most of their friends, colleagues and supporters are all lawyers. Shakespeare had the right idea centuries ago.
BSD is closer to public domain than GPL, and Government-funded code SHOULD be public domain.
It should be BSD licence for the taxpayers who paid for it, and GPL for everyone else in the world. That's fair because everyone only pays once but does pay, whether in cash or in contributed code.
The reason that ISPs don't want to help the police in monitoring the activities of their users is that they know illegal activity is an attractive part of the Internet.
Well, maybe not illegal, but stuff you wouldn't necessarily want the public (and hence your family and friends) to know that you did, like looking at pr0n and gambling. Demand from paying pr0n customers is why we have cheap, ubiquitous bandwidth like ADSL available now. If those users go away, it'll make the dot.com implosion look like a picnic.
It is not politically possible for the government of the day to direct the content of the BBC
Other than appointing Party donors to all the top jobs, you mean? Which is exactly what they've done. I don't know if you caught any of the coverage of the recent Labour Party conference, but it was impossible to tell where the spin doctors stopped and the BBC began.
I don't really understand what a bank or hospital would need with a CAD or 3d rendering program? All they need is a front end to their database of clients/patients, which was mostly likely custom made for them in the first place.
There is masses and masses of software written specifically for Sun workstations running at banks, mostly combined analytic and deal capture systems. Sun made inroads into banking when traders needed rock-solid desktops well before you could do that with Windows (and you can these days, if you have competent sysadmins). In many cases, a bank will choose the software they want, and then choose from amongst the hardware/OS vendors that the software is available on, rather than choosing the equipment first - this is the same in engineering, geophysics, whatever. Applications are what matters - if you don't have them, your OS is going nowhere, no matter how good it is.
I'm not sure, but I think the guy going round shooting people at the moment has a gun.
He also has a white van... are you suggesting a correlation between van ownership and terrorism?
Why stop there? I bet he has toes too, and eyelashes! Quick, arrest everyone with toes and eyelashes!!
I think what this really needs is to be make easier for the mainstream, so anyone could do it. Perhaps bundle the tools (programming and deployment) with mainstream operating systems?
Sun have Grid Engine and I believe Intel have something similar. The issue is that this kind of distributed processing is only useful for problems that can be divided into many discrete subtasks, which do not need to interact with other nodes while they are running, otherwise the work you need to do to communicate between nodes slaughters performance (that's why clustering hasn't taken over the world, vertical scaling on an active backplane is still the best solution for most jobs). The typical corporate large-compute job is data mining or decision support, neither of which scale particularly well horizontally.
He did not want to go thru such an experience again, and thus told (threatened) me not to play with error message text.
It's a serious issue. If your customer has a system running bespoke code from many different vendors, and you have sloppy or frivolous errors in your logs, then there is a high likelihood that they will think the rest of your code is sloppy, and you will be the first person they call if anything goes wrong. Even if the problem is elsewhere, it still sucks up valuable time when you have to prove to them what really happened and why it's another vendor's fault. If you want to be taken seriously, then even the log files your application generates have to be polished.
How many such programs exist?
Have you ever had that feeling when you've written your program, it compiles with no errors, but you are afraid to run it because if it doesn't work, you've no idea what else to try?
Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, and disable all services.
An easier way to screw up any NT kernel based OS is to set its pagefile smaller than 2M. It'll still run, but it won't be a happy bunny...
You're not getting it. The implication is that the various 'isms' should be mixed together.
But North Korea has everything to gain from the South in terms of prosperity and freedom, and it is unclear what, if anything, the South would gain from the North. Really, the North Korean leadership have no bargaining chips apart from their army; their country is destitute and dependent on foreign aid to prevent mass starvation. Why do you think North Koreans frequently attempt to defect to the South but no-one wants to go the other way?
For successful blends of the three, think Canada, Australia, or Western Europe. Do you think that the average American is happier than the average citizen of these other places? Think again.
It's hard to say. In the short term it's very easy to buy the voter's favour with subsidies and welfare, even the ancient Romans knew this, but they called it "bread and circuses". The question is a long term one; how happy will the heavily taxed Western Europeans be when they reach their own retirements and find that the cupboard is bare?